New Worlds of Body, Mind & Spirit Since 1901
Honoring your ancestors, like any practice that deals with spirits, is a lot like cooking. Anyone can do it, not just people with special training. (That's a big part of the reason why I wanted to write a book about it!) But whether you're an amateur or a trained professional, you still need to stay in the moment and use your senses—or you might end up burning something. When you cook, you don't just put your food on the stove for ten minutes and trust that it's been cooked perfectly. Even if you're following a recipe and the recipe says, "cook for ten minutes," you need to watch the food change color, smell it as it becomes more fragrant, and maybe even taste it to know for ...
As an introduction to my new book, Celtic Tree Rituals: Ceremonies for the Thirteen Moon Months and a Day, I invite you to think about why we do ceremonies. Why ceremonies? They embrace our true nature and delight our imagination. They cross over the boundaries into the magical. They bring healing in unexpected ways. In my experience, ceremonies create sacred space for magic to happen. Stuff happens. Healing occurs. Connections are made with the ancestors, loved ones that have passed over, pets, deities, totems, guides, and helpers. And within the Celtic tradition, access to this healing is our birthright, and I have witnessed this over and over in my practice. Just the other day after ...
What is good juju? How you can create it? How can you keep it flowing positively in your life? Good juju is a handshake with Spirit. It is an acknowledgement, an agreement, and a commitment you keep with your higher power, deities, ancestors, and divine beings, on a consistent basis. Good juju recognizes that you not alone on your path. It recognizes that many have come before you, and also that many shall come after you. It recognizes your belief in a Higher Power, forces at work, seen and unseen, greater than yourself. Good juju lies in the morning sunrise, the whispers of the wind, the ebb and flow of the ocean, the gurgling of a mountain stream. It wafts around you as sweet incense ...
In the Witch Power Series, (The Witch's Book of Power, The Witch's Book of Spirits, and The Witch's Book of Mysteries) we take a deep dive into the concepts of power and how we as witches cultivate it. One of the central themes throughout the series is the notion that witchcraft and the spirit world are uniquely tied together and that building a deeper practice often means building bridges between ourselves and the spirit world. This isn't always easy; society conditions us to trade our ties to the otherworldly for a sense normalcy and control. As witches, however, much of what we do depends on breaking through the copacetic and embracing the transcendental. Here are six things you can do ...
